Restoration of a 1988 Needlework Project

There were all sorts of problems with this piece, "A Child's World," that I worked on in 1988-89.  First, it had been stitched in separate parts and appliquéd to a pink-striped cotton background, but it had not been attached properly.  So, it was sagging a bit.

The stars and moon seemed too heavy for the fabric.

And here, in the black space under the blue trees, there should have been a white cloud.  All that remained was bits of white wool roving and empty white cotton stitches, thanks to the diligence of a moth or a moth army.  The photo shows it after I had removed all the stitches and the tiny bit of remaining wool, very carefully lifting the white fragments from the black linen:

Beneath the cloud, there were little streamers of couched floss representing streaming rain.  The moths had sampled one, which meant they needed to be removed, as well.

But how to fix all of this?

First, I added tiny 15˚ silver seed beads to the starry sky, attaching the fabric more firmly to the ground.  I also stitched around the several layers of appliqué (invisibly, using a beading needle), which further held the center portion in place.  I will admit to taking a long time at this while I handled the piece and tried to re-familiarize myself with the fabric and the stitching problems there.  As I discovered, those problems were legion.

Foremost was the need to re-design the unfortunate main-course cloud.  I decided on satin stitches, which required a smooth surface— the pink striped background was anything but smooth.  So I had to think of a way to even out the bumps in the fabric before I could re-stitch the cloud.

After some thought and a cup of tea, I decided that the best thing to do was to slit the back of the ground fabric in two places and remove some of the heavy-weight cotton that defined the stripes.  Bringing myself to take embroidery scissors to the back of this piece took a great exercise of my powers of persuasion.  I talked to myself the entire time, giving myself instructions and praise as the scissors snipped the fragile threads holding everything together.  Once I had removed them (you can see how fat the yarn was in the picture, below, upper right), I had to slip a piece of soft linen between the black linen where the scene was originally embroidered and the backing fabric.  I then replaced the fat strips of yarn with smaller yarn (I used a cotton/linen yarn) and did a rough job of re-weaving the openings.

The resulting embroidery is this— a lavender and magenta cloud with streamers of new metallic-thread rain (hoping both threads are not tasty to a moth):

Below is a picture of the restored embroidery— this took two days of quite intensive work!  You can see in the stars and the "comet" were the beads were added, and the cloud and streamers of rain are replaced, on the right.

Below is a closer look at the stream that springs from the base of the mountain— flower thread with wooden beads attached!

It was too beautiful to not repair and restore it.  I will take this to the framers for mounting in the next few weeks.  I almost hate to put it behind glass, it is so beautiful to touch!

Poor little piece!  But "A Child's World" has been restored, finally.  I wonder if The Adorables will enjoy it?